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“…There’s an old brain teaser that goes like this: You have a pond of a certain size, and upon that pond, a single lilypad. This particular species of lily pad reproduces once a day, so that on day two, you have two lily pads. On day three, you have four, and so on.
Now the teaser. “If it takes the lily pads 48 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take for the pond to be covered halfway?”
The answer is 47 days. Moreover, at day 40, you’ll barely know the lily pads are there.
That grim math explains why so many people — including me — are worried about the novel coronavirus, which causes a disease known as covid-19. And why so many other people think we are panicking over nothing.
During the current flu season, they point out, more than 250,000 people have been hospitalized in the United States, and 14,000 have died, including more than 100 children. As of this writing, the coronavirus has killed 29 people, and our caseload is in the hundreds. Why are we freaking out about the tiny threat while ignoring the big one? . . .
But go back to those lily pads: When something dangerous is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t. In the early days of the Wuhan epidemic, when no one was taking precautions, the number of cases appears to have doubled every four to five days.
The crisis in northern Italy is what happens when a fast doubling rate meets a “threshold effect,” where the character of an event can massively change once its size hits a certain threshold.
In this case, the threshold is things such as ICU beds. If the epidemic is small enough, doctors can provide respiratory support to the significant fraction of patients who develop complications, and relatively few will die. But once the number of critical patients exceeds the number of ventilators and ICU beds and other critical-care facilities, mortality rates spike. . . .
The experts are telling us that here in the United States, we can avoid hitting that threshold where sizable regions of the country will suddenly step into hell. We still have time to #flattenthecurve, as a popular infographic put it, slowing the spread so that the number of cases never exceeds what our health system can handle. The United States has an unusually high number of ICU beds, which gives us a head start. But we mustn’t squander that advantage through complacency.
So everyone needs to understand a few things.
First, the virus is here, and it is spreading quickly, even though everything looks normal. Right now, the United States has more reported cases than Italy had in late February. What matters isn’t what you can see but what you can’t: the patients who will need ICU care in two to six weeks. . . .
Second, this is not “a bad flu.” It kills more of its hosts, and it will spread farther unless we take aggressive steps to slow it down, because no one is yet immune to this disease. It will be quite some time before the virus runs out of new patients.
Third, we can fight it. Despite early exposure, Singapore and Hong Kong have kept their caseloads low, not by completely shutting down large swaths of their economies as China did but through aggressive personal hygiene and “social distancing.” South Korea seems to be getting its initial outbreak under control using similar measures. If we do the same, we can not only keep our hospitals from overloading but also buy researchers time to develop vaccines and therapies.
Fourth, and most important: We are all in this together. It is your responsibility to keep America safe by following the CDC guidelines, just as much as it is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s or President Trump’s responsibility to lead us to safety. And until this virus is beaten, we all need to act like it…”
hat tip to Glenn Reynolds
Higher learning or forced conformity to liberal orthodoxy?
The snow is melting already! 😂 pic.twitter.com/ppDkNunXPl
— Karli Bonne’ 🇺🇸 (@KarluskaP) March 10, 2020
I feel sorry about the poor education and poor parenting this young girl has received.
You can’t make this stuff up!
NEW: House Majority Whip James Clyburn tells NPR if Bernie Sanders doesn't win any states tonight, the Democratic National Committee should "shut this primary down" and "cancel the rest of these debates." https://t.co/qdk7LADWXk pic.twitter.com/ZxbEOb6hPl
— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) March 11, 2020
If Clyburn says it is a foregone conclusion, why would anyone disagree?
On the other hand, Tuberville seems like a decent guy
They are super smart!
Nitwit’s are going to nit!
It’s a panic, oh wait, no it’s not!
Elisabeth Dellinger and Todd Bliman:
“…Interviews with professionals uniformly agree on this point. If you use basic math and simply divide the number of deaths by the total number of identified cases, you may think the death rate is 3.4%. But the trouble with this is, again, identification. As Tom Frieden, former director of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), put it, the 3.4% rate “is certainly an overestimate.” The reason: Limited testing means many mild cases went unidentified. At a panel discussion Friday on Capitol Hill, Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Tom Inglesby stated that roughly 80% of known cases were mild. So mild that patients recovered with no hospitalization or medical intervention. (Some 15% did need hospitalization and 5% critical attention.) Many others likely didn’t even know they had it.
This means we don’t have the right denominator to calculate the death rate. In South Korea, where testing has been more aggressive, Dr. Inglesby noted the death rate was 0.6%. Frieden told Bloomberg reporters he expected the death rate to eventually hover around 1%. Now, that is speculation to an extent, but it is educated speculation that seems logical given the backdrop. That puts the death rate higher than influenza, which CDC estimates killed an average 0.14% of people who contracted it from the 2010/2011 flu season through 2017/2018.[i] But it is far lower than mortality rates tied to 2003’s Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and other similar outbreaks…”
DAVID CATRON:
“…It’s clear that the Democrats see the coronavirus outbreak as an opportunity rather than an epidemic. Having failed to bring down President Trump with ridiculous conspiracy theories involving Russia and Ukraine, they are desperately attempting to convince the public he is somehow exacerbating the COVID-19 crisis. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, issued a joint press release Sunday that included the following fiction: “President Trump continues to manufacture needless chaos within his administration and it is hampering the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.” Predictably, Pelosi and Schumer fail to provide any objective facts to support this claim.
This is just the latest in a series of irresponsible assertions by the Democrats…”
https://twitter.com/TombStoneWyatt/status/1236695844096741376
They're really excited about the idea of people dying so they can take back control. https://t.co/QbRjdwKGY4
— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) March 6, 2020
